A Must Read: ANGEL BONES by Ilyse Kusnetz

Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz 

This book seems to have crawled into my DNA, slipped under the skin and become a part of me. I adore everything about it. For example, the cover art on Angel Bones by Ilyse Kusnetz is from a painting by Remedios Varo, one of my all time favorite painters. The poems inside attest to a life well lived. They sing with a praise for this world even in the poet's leave taking. Clear from the first poem, "Blessing for Beauty," is the indisputable truth that the speaker is living with cancer.

Maybe the universe wants to spare me the apocalypse,
maybe it wants me to counsel the dead,
maybe the cancer finds me so delicious
it wants to eat me from the inside out...

Oh trees, flowers, small animals at the bird feeder---

And so the poems unspool, sometimes in high lyric and sometimes in plain truth. Many of the poems are also love poems to Kusnetz's husband, poet and writer, Brian Turner. One of my (many) favorites comes late in the book and is not technically a love poem at all, "Meditation on "Cottage Window, St. Remy de Provence."

And so perhaps we cannot furl the lit hours
inside ourselves, relive their sinuous grace

The poems range from the philosophical to science fiction, to nature, to a love of ginormous proportions. In my copy the pages are folded back, marked and reread again. I promise Angel Bones will make a difference in your life. It has in mine.